Haswell tablets to offer 8 to 10 hour battery life

We have already mentioned Intel’s one-chip Haswell platform on several occasions, but we have managed to get a few extra details about this chip. As we have stated many times before 1 chip Haswell has BGA packaging packed with SoC that integrates a Haswell CPU as well as Lynx Point LP PCH chipset inside.

The SoC packaging leads to lower production costs, power footprint and lower TDP, everything that you need in order to drive the SoC price down. We remembered Dave Orton, the former CEO of a company acquired by AMD that went by the name of ATI, explaining the importance of APUs and SoCs. The explanation is rather simple, the more you integrate the cheaper the chip ends up, the fewer pins you have and theoretically you can make more money. This conversation happened in the summer of 2007, roughly a year after AMD acquired ATI and announced its plans to produce Fusion APUs.

Since the top ARM chips such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 / 600 and Tegra 4 have multiple cores, chipset elements and graphics all on the same package, it was only natural for Intel to take the same approach with Haswell. Qualcomm, Nvidia and Intel are after the same market, tablets, notebooks, convertibles with a slight advantage that Intel has X86 and the other two don’t.

Let's not forget that Haswell 1- chip is much bigger than any ARM based top performers, but at the same time Haswell brings a lot more performance. Despite billions of transistors and 22nm SoC design tablets and Ultrabooks based on 1-chip Haswell or Haswell-ULT how some call it, you can expect 8- to 10-hour battery from products based on this Y processor line chips. This is a respectable score for PC like performance and having a scenario design power (SDP) typical expected TDP at 7.5W these products come close to the top ARM performers that have 5+W TDP.

Intel stresses that these chips won't simply land in tablets and Ultrabooks. It plans to use them in detachable, foldable and similar designs usually represented as the result of an unholy coupling between a notebook and a tablet.

The bad thing is that Y line of tablet, Ultrabook, de-attachable, switchable SoC Haswell chips only comes in Q4 2013 so we are in for a pretty long wait.